The deep penetration of digital technology and mobile telephony has brought about a radical shift in patients’ approach towards doctors as well as their demands from healthcare providers. Having easy access to Internet and smartphones, patients today are highly informed. In fact, they want to access information about doctors, about available pathology and lab technology in hospitals before they actually visit or seek an appointment. It is therefore imperative on us to ensure that all relevant information and details are provided by us on our hospital website.

Dr. Devendra Kumar Punia as Corporate Head – Information Technology, Paras Healthcare talked about how their digital transformation journey to transform patient inflow at OPD/Labs and cater the challenges they were facing.

Challenges

As a hospital, we struggle to manage the patient inflow at OPD/labs, cut waiting time in queues, and fasten up service delivery. Patients today regard convenience as very important. A lot of patients today want to take prior appointments online to be able to save time and effort.

Aligning our services to be able to meet the changing requirements of the time has been an important challenge that we have worked to overcome. The essence of our digital solutions is to ensure fast delivery with the utmost efficiency and greatest satisfaction. Making reports available online for download is another key strategy that allows patients to access their reports without the need for travelling all the way to the laboratory.

Solution: App Development

As mentioned above, our digital solutions have been devised to make it easy for patients to check information about doctor availability, take appointments and even make payments online. We have devised a self-service kiosk as well as a digital application where patients can check doctor availability, take a suitable appointment and make payment. The app also allows getting a print of the prescription and invoice as well as viewing lab reports, all at the click of a mouse.

Results

Though the initial adoption by patients of app and self-service kiosks has been low (3% of total appointments) in absolute numbers, we have been able to reduce the total process time to get the patient to see the consultant by 60%. The wait / queue time before seeing the doctor has been drastically reduced for the app / self-service kiosk patients. I am sure more and more patients will hop on to these options gradually as they realize the benefit and convenience accruing from it.

Additional Benefits:

Cutting waiting time brings a lot of convenience to patients, and it also allows us to manage our OPD inflow better. At the same time, when patients are connected to the hospital via an app, it is much easier to inform them about any delay or rescheduling of an appointment.

In fact, we are working to further improvise and add more services to the app. We intend to move a number of other services like canteen services, location services, e-consultation, electronic health record etc. to the app, giving the patients a larger control and freedom to manage their health records, keep track of their health conditions and engage better with the hospital.